James Maddison put Tottenham ahead and Dejan Kulusevski came back after 526 days out, as Spurs beat Coventry 3-1 on Monday and claimed their first league win of the season. Ben Davies then settled it with a late deflected goal, a result that lifted Tottenham off the bottom even though they were still only 16th by the end of the night.
For Maddison, the opening goal mattered beyond the scoreline. It was an arcing finish against his hometown club, and it arrived on the same night Tottenham ended a run that had left them searching for a league victory for weeks. Kulusevski's return in the 87th minute only sharpened the sense that the team was trying to move past a long stretch of absences and uncertainty.
The scale of that absence tells its own story. Kulusevski had not played for Spurs since 11 May 2025, when the club were already 17th, and Tottenham finished that season in the same place before slipping to 17th again in 2025-26. During that span they signed 20 players, permanently or on loan, at a cost of £530m, yet the league table still looked stubbornly familiar by Monday evening.
That is the awkward truth sitting behind the result. Tottenham won, but the victory only nudged them away from the bottom rather than into safety, and the club's recent history still reads like a series of resets. The last league win over Coventry before this one came in 2001, when George Graham was in charge and Sergiy Rebrov scored in a 3-0 success, a reminder of how rare this fixture has been for Spurs in the league.
So the headline is not just that Tottenham won, but that Maddison delivered the opening blow in a match that briefly made the season look less broken. Whether that is a turning point or just one clean night in a messy campaign is the question now hanging over the team after a win that needed both a return and a finish to feel complete.
